Something in common, something out of the common
by planet p
Summary: AU; slash, Kyle/Alex -- If you do not think this is your sort of thing, I’d not advise that you read. Next chapter is graphic. If you want to flame, please make it interesting.
1. Chapter 1

**Something in common, something out of the common** by planet p

**Disclaimer** I don't own _the Pretender_ or any of its characters.

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Kyle ~ 17

Alex ~ 23

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_1976_

Kyle had scored a grade lower than he had the previous year on his skills evaluation, and the Tower hadn't been pleased; nor, as it turned out, had the Chairman.

Alex had scored an SGL-4 in Standing Grade, as he did every year, and even Jarod had managed an SGL-6, which (on a scale of 10 to 1, with SGL-10 as the lowest possible skill level, and SGL-1 as the highest possible skill level) was a grade higher than Kyle on SGL-7.

Alex found the younger Pretender in the old Commons and sat down beside him in front of the wall. Angelo wasn't about, and Jarod never came down to Commons because it wasn't allowed. Alex supposed it _could_ have been allowed, if Sydney had wanted it to be, but apparently Sydney was against Jarod spending time with any of Raines' 'subjects.'

He didn't know how to react to someone who was crying, so he didn't. Instead, he patted Kyle's arm absently, and thought about what he might say to him.

The whole idea of the Standing Grade Level was petty, something like T-Corp's Reaper Categories, or the Center's Empath Classing System, and unsubstantiated, at best. Everybody had off days, and to expect them to be on par one hundred percent of the time was hypocritically pathetic, not to mention, impossible.

Their mentors weren't always 'good to go,' so why should they have been?

Because they had stability and security? Because they had routine? All things that were nice to know when you didn't _actually_ have a life, he was sure.

"Hey, it's bullshit!" he told Kyle, turning to glance at him. "Why let it upset you?"

It was always Alex's catchphrase that there were cleaner ways to say things than to resort to profanity, so it was mostly his choice of wording that encouraged Kyle to look at him.

"I've been on a Four since I was _four_," Alex told him. "You don't think there's something wrong with that idea? Jarod was a Five when he first came in. Nothing that they say is standard _is_ ever standard; they don't know any more than we do what they're talking about. You shouldn't let them get to you. This is our world, their world is out there, with the families and streets and shopping centres and cars. They're just visitors here; they come, they see, they don't understand; they don't _live_ here! The good ones are able to _comprehend_ that there is something to _be_ understood, but not what, not as we do."

Kyle wiped his face with a hand. "I was better last year," he said.

"And Raines had a family last year," Alex replied.

Kyle frowned, wiping at his face again.

"They're not going to find her; she's gone."

"They might-"

He hadn't meant to imply anything by it, just that circumstances changed, but obviously he'd said the wrong thing. "She's not some kid who was snatched by a freak with deep-seated psychological trauma," Alex told him bluntly. He'd thought Kyle had understood as much, but perhaps he had a reason not to want to understand. "She was 19. I don't find it at all likely that she'll be returned home safe and sound. There's been no demands, no ransom; that, in itself, must strike one as suspicious."

Kyle looked away from him, clearly harbouring his own thoughts on the matter.

"Do you think she's going to come home one day; just mosey on up to her old man's front door and give that door a rap of her knuckles and say, 'Hey, pop, let me in; I've lost my key,' casual as you please?" Alex fixed Kyle with a serious gaze. "Kyle? Is that what you think?"

Kyle looked around at him suddenly. "No!"

"Then what's the matter? You believe that she was a good girl, so good things should happen to her, not any of those bad things that you've been told befell her? You think it's a conspiracy, there's something else going on? The aliens took her, hmm?"

Kyle laughed. "No!"

"Then what, Kyle?" Alex demanded. "What?"

Kyle shook his head. "I don't know," he replied. "It doesn't matter," he added.

Alex sighed. "It's not your fault, you know. Angelo got nothing; Jarod got nothing. You're not expected to fill in their blanks where they fall short, Kyle. That's not how it is."

Kyle rubbed his face.

Alex shifted sideways and put his arms around him. "Hey, it's not your fault. I mean it."

Kyle sniffed, more tears dribbling down his face. "It _has_ to be," he said.

"No, it doesn't. And it isn't," Alex told him, closing his eyes and placing a kiss on his hair. Just because the Tower had been antagonised over the fact that he'd scored lesser than one year ago, Kyle believed that everything that had and could go wrong must be his fault! As far as Alex had heard, the Tower evaluators didn't, themselves, possess the anomaly, or any of its expressions, so why should Kyle have thought that they knew anything?

"It _is_ my fault…"

"Stop it! It isn't," Alex admonished. "Don't you let Raines hear you saying that; don't even think it! It isn't anyone's fault."

"It-"

"If it's anyone's fault here, then it's mine!" Alex told him, annoyed. "Not yours, or Angelo's, or Jarod's. I'm a Tower Pretender; you three, you're just Branch toys. I don't mean to sound rude, but so far as the Tower's concerned, that is it. You're funny little toys; cute, but ineffectual; easily broken, like Timothy was. _I_ should have been the one the assignment came to, not Angelo, then Jarod, then you. Don't think that because you were the last that that makes it your fault; I wasn't even included in it when I had every reason to be. Don't you think, then, that that makes it my fault? More than yours? But, you know what; you know whose fault it really is, if we're going to be dishing out blame? It's the Tower's, because they've a vendetta against Raines, and they decided that the fact that Anora was his daughter meant that they had a vendetta against her, too, when they'd never even met her. If you want to lay the blame with anyone, it belongs with them."

Kyle lifted his face up a bit, smudging his tears with a hand.

"Another paving stone on their merry little path to Hell!" Alex added, to cap of his little lecture. Still, if he'd wanted, he might have insisted. He looked at Kyle properly and messed his hair up a bit, hoping to distract him.

Kyle patted his hair back to some semblance of order, but he didn't look annoyed.

Alex sighed. He wondered when Angelo was coming back and they could get back to teasing him. "Where is-" His sentence was cut short by Kyle kissing him. His hands shot to Kyle's arms, and he pushed him away from him carefully.

"Where is who?" Kyle asked, as though nothing had happened.

"Angelo!" Alex muttered, a little too snappily. Why had Kyle done that?

"How should I know?"

Alex scowled.

"Alex?"

Alex forced himself to look at Kyle, instead of around the room. "What?"

"Are you upset?"

"Why would I be upset?" Alex snapped.

"Because of just before."

"Do you think that I am-"

"I'm not homosexual," Kyle interrupted, looking annoyed.

"Right!"

Kyle looked away from him. He could try to explain it, but it wouldn't come out right. "I just want-"

Alex pulled him closer for a hug. "I get it, Kyle. You want someone to feel close to, to feel physically intimate with. But I'm not that person. I can't… _do_ intimate…"

Kyle made a face.

"I have a lot of regard for you, Kyle, and, you know, for me, that's something to be said, in itself, but-"

Kyle shoved him away from him. "Forget it!" he snapped.

Alex frowned. "No, Kyle. Can't you just listen to what I'm saying?"

"I know what you're saying!" Kyle shot meanly, turning a glare on him.

Alex crossed his arms. "You're not even listening," he told him.

"Why should I fucking listen?" Kyle yelled, going red in the face.

"You should li-"

"SHUT UP, YOU STUPID FUCKING LUNATIC!" Kyle shouted, leaping to his feet.

Alex stood up, grabbing hold of his arm before he took off to scream at someone else. He really wanted something better for Kyle, but if all Kyle wanted was physical intimacy, then he didn't see why he should protest; he didn't have any feelings on the subject either way. He took hold of Kyle's other arm and turned him about, pressing him against the wall, and kissed him, hoping that Angelo stayed away.

Angelo wasn't damaged in the same way that Kyle was, and it wouldn't do if he had a sudden urge to connect with the part of Kyle that was.


	2. Chapter 2

_This chapter graphically depicts M/M sex; if you don't like such things, please don't read._

Clasping Kyle's hand in his, Alex led him from the main antechamber, toward a room off Commons. Inside the room, he pressed him toward a table, and Kyle lifted himself swiftly to sit upon it, opening his legs as Alex pressed nearer.

With steady hands, Alex removed his shirt, and dipped his face, taking a nipple in his mouth and biting it gently, and, with his other hand, placed it palm flat on his stomach, gliding it slowly toward his abdomen.

Kyle leant backward and caught his legs around the backs of Alex's leg, fisting his hand in the shirt covering his back, and Alex lifted his swiftly from the table, causing his legs to tighten about his waist, and propped his back against a nearby wall.

Even without Kyle's groin pressed to his stomach, he could have seen his erection, but he preoccupied himself with kissing his neck. In a steady voice, some minutes later, he asked close to Kyle's ear, "Is this what you want?"

Kyle's nod of affirmation was felt much more than his thready voice which breathed an excited, uncertain, "Yes." Only uncertain, Alex knew, because he'd never done this sort of thing before.

Alex removed the hand which had slid around to cover his backside, and drew back his mouth from his ear. "Then it's your turn," he responded. Contrary to Kyle's state, he wasn't aroused at all, and he had a feeling it wouldn't work were he not.

Alex felt Kyle's legs loosen and slide from his waist, and heard when he touched with the floor again, and turned and walked back toward the tables, arranged vaguely as though in conference formation, and chose one table.

By the time Kyle reached him, he'd managed to lower his trousers, and he felt the fabric of Kyle's clothes press close to his skin, warmed by his body heat. He tightened his hands on the table's edge, and adjusted his stance again as Kyle rested his head on his back, working on getting his own pants loose.

He told himself he wouldn't close his eyes when it happened, but he bit down hard on his lip instinctively to pause any wandering screams and tasted blood there. It'd swell up later, but he didn't allow the thought space to break free and roam, instead concentrating on the warmth of Kyle's chest against his clothed back.

It would do no good to admit that it hurt – he supposed there were ways of doing these things which required a little help from outside interventions, such, he further supposed, as lubricant – so he started thinking about the workshop his father had kept, which he'd been able to see as a small doll's house outside the window from which he'd pushed Lacey to her death. He'd not meant it, not in the way that it had happened, he'd always maintained; he'd meant to _hurt_ her, to frighten her, not, certainly _not_, to kill her.

How strange that his small four-year-old act of rebellion, of striking out with 'Hey, no, _you_ listen to me, this time, _you_ listen to _me_' should have ended with Lacey's death, and how sad. He was certain, still, that it encompassed the reason his mother had sent him away, to be far from her, and for him to be far from his last remaining family member, his last source of warmth, love and encouragement. She'd been so angered, so _mad_, at what he'd done. And he, he had killed his 18-year-old sister, closer to him than even his mother, he'd taken away her life without a thought on the subject at all.

He deserved everything that had come to him, he often thought. And more.

He'd never forget her face, or her fair hair. She was his sister, yet as far from him in looks as humanly possible. She was beautiful, back when she'd still lived, and he'd been ordinary, and ordinary child, living an ordinary life, until one act of anger and recrimination over a mean name, dropped in haste, in annoyance, had taken all that away; shattered it like lightening shattered a tree.

He bit down harder on his lip, but there was no way to stop the tears that coursed down his face, and he thought of Lacey's funeral, of the neat grass, and his mother, and the tears that would have coursed down her face, the tears that he might have seen, had he been in attendance, but he'd been cast from familiar family scenes such as funerals days before, into an unfamiliar and baffling new world.

In the beginning, he'd been an intruder to this new world, but, over the years, the alienation left him, though, as he grew older, he, arguably, became more and more alienated from those that inhabited his world, just as Lacey had left that window, just as her spirit had rose up from her body in death's slumber. He barely noticed it, it was just one of those things that was bound to happen, and, then, one day, eventually did, with no especial marking of the calendar, the date and exact time, or lunar phases, and no especial celebration.

He knew, of course, that Kyle had come to the Center as a one-year-old; their cases were, in fact, entirely separate. Where Alex's mentor had not changed since he'd first been assigned him as a four-year-old, Kyle's had changed twice. If he were to change again, it wouldn't be kind on Kyle, as much as Raines had never been that, at all.

It would be worse.

He removed a hand from the table's edge and reached for one of Kyle's. It would all be okay. It would all work out in the end.

_

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_

_I need to work on Kyle and Alex's relationship where Kyle isn't trying to make out with guys; I know. (Why? I like Kyle/Lolly! I don't know why, then.) But I will work on it._

_Flames accepted._

_Thanks for reading._


	3. Chapter 3

_I wish my neighbour would stop playing that cacophony he believes to be music into all hours of the night and morning. It really isn't, neighbour, it's awful._

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_2000_

Outside, with his older brother, Jarod, he dreamed of Allie. He did not have the memories that Jarod had, that there should have been parents – a mother and father – but he had memories of Allie: a friend; a co-worker, as much as what they'd done for the Center could be called work; a girl he'd harboured vague dreams of becoming his future _someone_, and a sister.

But Allie had died – done away with by Alex, or rescued by Catherine Parker, he didn't know, and maybe, he thought, he didn't want to. (Knowing would mean the owing of an apology, or the expectation of a renewed hatred, and he wanted neither of those things.)

He wanted to live, but life was so hard, and so complicated.

He saw that Jarod had hope, even still, even after all that had happened and had been done to him, and he knew that it should have warmed him to hope's arms also, but he remained cold, unwilling. There was so much to look forward to – _so_, so much – but he'd had too much, already, and he could not think of anymore.

He lived in old dreams, in an old life, and hoped that when he woke from his dreams of that old life, he'd soon return, soon be carried from his new life into the past, into familiarity and a children's optimism which had not carried forth into adulthood, as though packed away with all of the old clothes that no longer fitted, and sealed up tight to be sent away, to be thrown out, or donated to one to whom it would, might, fit.

Yes, it was so clear, now. Now, all he had left to fight for was Jarod's hope, that Jarod should not lose his hope. Hope could mend so much, from broken to mending, with only hope; not mended so that nothing of the hurt and brokenness could be seen, but mended with scars, wary scars, scars to live a brighter, better life by.

But he had too many invisible scars, and scars that one could not see were the type that were no good; one did not want such scars.

It wasn't especially windy that day, yet not especially still, either. And when he looked through the space between them, between his enemy and he, he saw that something had changed.

The guardian angel had returned, at last.

And that was when he knew what he had to do. The angel was giving him a way out, and a way to redemption.

He had to trust the angel.

It wouldn't hurt for long, not long at all, he thought.

And perhaps, one day, Jarod would understand. One more invisible scar, but not all scars were bad.

A scar was something healed, something mended. Scars meant hope from pain and darkness, hope for joy and light.

It didn't hurt, not really; he only wished it hadn't had to have hurt Jarod.

But Jarod's hope would go on, it was bright around him, inside him, and in Kyle's passing moments, it shone.

It was so warm.

Oh, it was his brother. His _very_ own brother. How nice to know. And feel it, with care.

_Goodbye, brother_, he thought.

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_Gloomy and doomy; my apologies._

_Thanks for reading. This is the end._


End file.
